It was just a few days ago in my best Graphics Cards guide of January, 2014 that I said that we’re in a fairly volatile time in the PC gaming market. Now Nvidia have two more graphics cards which are rumored for release the first quarter of this year. From the sound of the rumors, they are not based on the Maxwell architecture, bur rather yet further improvements to the tried and tested Keplar architecture.

It’s perhaps strange to some that Nvidia aren’t rushing the Maxwell architecture out, but from previous comments, it seems they are focused on pushing the lower performance Maxwell parts out first. This means that the GeForce GTX Titan Black Edition and Nvidia GeForce GTX 790 have a purpose to come to market.

Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Black Edition

Since the release of AMD R9 290X and Nvidia’s own GTX 780 Ti, Nvidia’s Geforce GTX Titan has ceased to be the best purchase for gamer’s. For those looking to rely on heavy compute performance, the Titan still held a lot of sway, but for the average gamer, it wasn’t a smart purchase. But this is going to be changing, with Nvidia invigorating the Geforce GTX Titan by releasing the Titan Black Edition. It’s pretty damn similar to that of the GTX 780 Ti. It features better double precision compute performance, and thus more FP64. Another huge bonus is double the amount of RAM, meaning that we’ll be seeing 6GB on the GTX Titan Black Edition vs the standard 3GB on the GTX 780 Ti.

If this is true, we’ll be seeing the rather familiar specs of 2880 CUDA Cores, 280 TMU (Texture Mapping Units) and 48 ROPS. There’s no word on the exact pricing, but the GTX Titan Black Edition likely hit the $999 mark and is rumored to be hitting shelves at ‘some point’ during February to March, 2014.

Somewhat off topic, Black Edition is also well known from Nvidia’s rival, AMD, but rather than for Graphics Cards, AMD’s is for CPU’s, signifying that the processor is unlocked and easily overclockable.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 790

As you’d expect given the above specs, this isn’t going to be a case of the Titan being the ‘best performer’ for games. It’ll be pretty damn similar (although it’s possible 6GB frame buffer could help in high res SLI gaming) to the Geforce GTX 780 Ti. Therefore this would mean that gamer’s would likely be better off to opt for the GTX 780 Ti, simply due to cost. Unless you’re in the need for the extra compute power of the Titan that is.

So, Nvidia’s best and only move is to release the GTX 790. There’s not much info known yet on the specs, but it’s likely that we’ll not be seeing full GK110 cores. This is likely to help keep power and heat at a more manageable level. We’ll likely be seeing 4992 CUDA cores (2496 CUDA Cores x 2 GK110). Rumors show a 320-bit bus, meaning we’ll have 5GB RAM x 2 (10GB total) rather than the 6GB you might expect.

Once again, the GTX 790 doesn’t have a firm release date, but if the rumors hold true we’ll be seeing it likely in March, this year (2014).

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